Poison Tree (10 page)

“Let’s go clean up,” she said.

It’s over
. Not the way she wanted it to be over, but what else could she do?

C
HRISTIAN WAS STILL
sleeping when he heard a knock on his hotel room door. He opened his eyes, shut them against the glare of midday sun streaming in his window, and then forced them open once more as he stood up and crossed to the door.

Before he reached it or leaned down to look through the peephole, Alysia said, “It’s me. Can I come in?”

He couldn’t help but smile. He hadn’t told her where he was staying, or even the name he had used to register at this hotel, but he had used a name she would recognize from past exploits. It had probably taken Alysia ten minutes, at most, to hack into and scan through local hotel registries in order to track him down.

Christian remembered the day that Alysia had tried to
explain to him why she had worked so hard to digitalize Frost, and why the Bruja guilds needed to move “out of the Stone Age and into the Silicon Age.”
Piracy isn’t done with a ship and a sword anymore
, she had told him, pacing back and forth, frustrated by his lack of interest.
A Crimson or Onyx member might take a contract to kill some wealthy businessman, probably because his heirs want to inherit his money, but it ends there. In the digital world, it’s possible to assassinate a man’s character, steal his identity, turn his world upside down without ever spilling a drop of blood. Bruja was big and powerful two centuries ago, but these days, they’re earning penny candy to engage in little local scuffles. They’re going to fade into obscurity if they don’t realize the world has upgraded from a blade to binary
.

Christian didn’t understand half the words Alysia used when she went on one of her tech rants—Onyx had never been big on computer work, so he knew little about them—but her passion on the subject never failed to make him grin, especially when it made the leaders of Crimson, Onyx, and the Bruja guilds gnash their teeth because they knew she was right but refused to admit it.

His smile disappeared when he opened the door and saw the blood on her face. She glanced over her shoulder as he pulled her inside, and that was enough warning for him to shut, lock, and bolt the door behind her.

“Someone following you?” he asked, his eyes lingering on a cut down her cheek. It was too neat to be the result of someone’s fist splitting the skin; that wound had been made by a blade.

“Could be,” she answered. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?” She flinched as he reached toward the
wound, which had started to scab in places but was still seeping blood in others. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “If you have bandages—”

“I have better,” he replied, gently brushing his fingertips over the edges of the wound. The lingering aura of firestone told him why the injury wasn’t worse: firestone drained vampiric power and wasn’t too good for shapeshifters, but it was less dangerous for humans than pure steel would be. The witch power embedded in the stone had helped her body staunch the bleeding.

Alysia stayed tensed, but she didn’t pull away again as he focused his power on the way her flesh had been cut and gently nudged it back into its proper form. If it hadn’t been on her face, he might have stopped as soon as the wound was closed, but he didn’t want to leave a scar, so he put a little extra power into erasing all evidence of the blade.

Alysia wasn’t vain, but scars drew attention. They looked suspicious.

Plus, he didn’t want to leave a mark on her face. But he knew she would accept the first explanation more than the second one. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Some bruised ribs,” she answered, “but that’s all. It could have been a lot worse. There’s a number up for my capture, apparently.”

“Since when?” he asked. He had checked all three guild boards before meeting Alysia that morning, to confirm that there wasn’t anything up about an attack on SingleEarth. He would have noticed a posting calling for Alysia’s abduction.

“Since about an hour ago, according to Ben,” she said. “It
even included my location. Someone probably called him because he was already there.”

“Ben the computer guy?” Christian asked. He had looked the geek in the eye and hadn’t seen or sensed a thing. Of course, he hadn’t spent a lot of time at Crimson since Alysia left—he had watched their Challenge because he wanted to know who Adam’s successor would be, but he hadn’t even competed—so it was possible Ben was a recent member of that guild. “He did this to you?”

“No, he’s the one who gave me the heads-up. He doesn’t do live captures,” she answered. The explanation wasn’t hard to believe; a lot of the mercenaries in Bruja would happily kill someone but had no interest in the inconvenience of a living prisoner. Especially in Crimson, it was rare to find someone interested in accepting a job for a capture.

Still, there were enough people who
would
go for a well-paying capture that it would be a good idea to move on as soon as possible. Christian had specifically chosen his current location so that Alysia could find him. If she could, so could others.

He reached forward again, intending to check on her ribs, but Alysia flinched again.

“One of Maya’s grunts gave me the new decorations,” she said, not meeting his gaze. “Unless she’s changed her ways and is giving her boys free will these days, that means more of them will show up soon. I have my rank-weapons, but no good way to carry most of them. Plus, I’m out of shape. I’ve had two people get the drop on me in less than an hour, and I think I got rescued by a nine-year-old.”

Normally Christian would have laughed and asked for the rest of that story, but Alysia’s jovial tone was too forced.

He hadn’t been a Triste the last time they had hunted together, so it was possible that the chaotic splash of emotions in her aura was normal for her when she was amped up for a fight, but he doubted it. One thing he knew for sure was that there were streaks of pain in there as well, pulsing in time with her breathing.

“Do you want me to check the ribs?” he asked.

Alysia paused, regarding him warily as she asked, “How much power do you burn with that kind of healing?”

“Not enough to compromise my ability to fight if we get in trouble,” he answered.

She didn’t answer immediately, and in the silence, the truth hit him. Alysia had left before he started training. The kind of ground rules they had set in the old days didn’t address situations in which one of them was potentially prey for the other.

“If I ever feed on you,” Christian assured her, “it will be because I need to in order to keep us alive, and I will make very sure you know about it. You trust me more than is normally healthy in our profession, but if I violated that trust by feeding on you, I have absolutely no doubt you would do everything in your power to kill me. Am I right?”

“Yeah.” She cautiously prodded her ribs, her gaze distant. “Nothing’s cracked. I’ll be fine, if I can figure out who’s offering a half-million dollars to kidnap me. It seems unlikely they just want to throw a surprise party.”

It has been two years
, he reminded himself. They were both
pretending no time had passed, but Alysia’s aura held the twisted shine of panic or even shock. Even if he had read her correctly earlier, even if she did miss Bruja—and, hopefully, him—she wasn’t here of her own free will. She was here because she had nowhere else to go.

But she trusts me enough to come here, to let me know I could earn a lot of quick cash for bringing her in, and to admit that she probably wouldn’t be able to defend herself
. She had trusted him enough to let her guard down the instant she recognized him that morning at SingleEarth, too. That meant something, right?

“Let’s move while we talk,” he said. “We can go by the house, get you better equipped, and then I can look up the posting against you.”

Alysia nodded. “Lead the way.”

“Could it be someone
at
SingleEarth who has it in for you?” Christian asked as he set a hand to the door and focused his power, checking the hall for any sign of movement. “Or did anyone else know where you were?”

“I take it you haven’t started watching the news in my absence,” Alysia remarked, following as he stepped through the door.

Her hand once again drifted to her cheek. Did it feel strange? He probably should have asked before healing it. But he wouldn’t have asked before helping her with a bandage. This was no different, really. Except that it obviously was, to her, and despite his assurances, Alysia had put plenty of space between them.

“What was on the news?” he asked.

“Me. And it was national, so the list of people who potentially know where I am isn’t short.”

They both instinctively quieted as they reached the parking lot. The snow had stopped, and there were people milling about, but it wasn’t the possibility of being overheard that made Christian tense. They were too exposed.

“We can leave my car,” Alysia said. “It doesn’t have anything in it except a completely legal registration under the surname I’m using at SingleEarth.”

“Good.”

They didn’t speak much more until they had both climbed into his car, a nondescript four-wheel drive—the only two things he much cared about when shopping for a vehicle—and Christian brought them out of town and onto what passed for a highway in this backwater spot.

“Question,” Alysia said as they left behind most signs of civilization. “Bruja allows contracts against anyone, for any reason,
except
guild leaders. There’s no reason I can think of that someone would want me this badly, but what about you? A capture is up close and has a high likelihood of complications compared to a kill, and much as I hate to admit it, there are a lot of people in Bruja who could have predicted I would go to you in this kind of situation. Do you think someone could be hoping you might get caught in the cross fire?”

The suggestion was not beyond the realm of possibility. Even if Christian hadn’t been a guild leader, most people would not have wanted to cross Pandora by directly targeting her most recent student. On the other hand, those same
people would know that a Triste was hard to kill and was unlikely to fall accidentally during a job with another purpose.

“It’s—”

The silver SUV cut into his field of vision and forced him to swing left. He heard Alysia yelp an expletive just before he felt the double concussion of tires exploding. Despite his Triste reflexes on the wheel, two flat tires on the still-slick roads sent the car into a spin.

Before he could even panic, the nose of the car was in the ditch between the road and a state forest.

“Cute,” Christian said dryly as he hastily removed his seat belt and exited the vehicle. Alysia did the same. Neither of them was stupid enough to believe this had been an accident, even before Alysia knelt down and picked up one of the silver stars that had been strewn at the edge of the road, waiting to destroy any tire that crossed them.

Alysia swore loudly, one hand instinctively going to her chest as the tension caused a twinge in her bruised ribs, the other reaching into her backpack, Christian hoped for a knife. Apparently, she had kept the weapons—probably for their sentimental value—but hadn’t kept easily replaced things like concealable sheaths on hand.

He drew his own knife and stretched out his awareness, trying to sense for anything alive or undead nearby. No one had gone to this much trouble to cause the accident without having a trap ready to close on them.

“We need to get away from the road,” Alysia said. “This is too exposed. Good Samaritan, EMT, police, tow company, anyone could pull over and we wouldn’t know if they were
for real or the next part of this trap. Can Triste power keep us from freezing to death if we go hiking?”

He didn’t get a chance to answer before two more of Maya’s crew showed up. Like wild dogs, they tended to travel in packs. Two years earlier, he would have put Alysia at his back and they could easily have taken down a half dozen of Maya’s boys, but she was out of practice, and if Alysia was the target, Christian didn’t want to put her directly in the vamps’ line of sight.

While he was looking over his shoulder to check the situation on her side, however, he missed the appearance of the third vampire. He barely caught a glimpse of the crossbow aimed at him before the bolt hit him high in the right side of the chest.

Perversely, Pandora’s training meant he could feel the exact damage done to the soft tissue of his lung, could feel where the edge of a barbed bolt nicked the aorta, a killing injury to almost anyone else.

It took the wind out of his lungs, made him fall, forced him to turn his attention inward to keep his body from bleeding to death.

Alysia will have to hold her own
.

T
IME AND EVENTS
seemed to blur. The fight with the vampire, Alysia, and then Jeht had taken less than a minute, but it seemed to stretch into an hour in Sarik’s memory.

In comparison, all the rest happened in a blink. The hunters arrived. Mark the groundskeeper came running after Quean, who had followed Jeht. The man took a child’s fist to the mouth as he tried to pull Quean away from the bloody scene.

Lynzi ran up next. She started to kneel to check Jeht for wounds, but Sarik shook her head. He was fine. He ordered Quean to calm down. The younger tiger obediently relaxed in Mark’s arms and, sucking his thumb, looked as innocent as any four-year-old.

Jason arrived, but when he first reached for Sarik, she recoiled.

The copper-rot taste of blood was still thick in Sarik’s mouth, but the fluid itself had gone dry, leaving a sticky, ashy texture like talcum powder on her tongue. She had more blood on her hands from the knife Jeht had handed her. She couldn’t stand for Jason to touch her.

He knelt beside the body instead and told them all, “His name is Liam. He works for a mercenary named Maya. He—”

“He was after Alysia,” Sarik said before Jason could blame himself. “I
saw
him stalking her. I needed to warn her. Alysia said this is about her. She says she didn’t mean to bring danger here. She’s leaving until it’s sorted out. She’s gone now.”